Revelation: collaborate to innovate in the public sector

I've just had a revelation.

In reality, it is putting the two main parts of my life together in the most obvious combination possible.


I'm on a mission to find out how I can help make government work better.  What I'm occupying my time with is helping to foster collaborative communities to drive innovation.

Is it obvious yet?


I have been thinking about how to spin a government innovation blog out of this one - which is really just a random collection of profersonal thoughts.  I've really struggled to find accessible material on the sort of innovation I am interested in on how government works.  Innovation driven by a vision of radical transformation, that is.  There are some people doing really good work in the area (like TACSI of course, and bunch of design and innovation companies), but most of what gets shared is still very external to the hairy challenges of how to transform how government works to make these alternative approaches more mainstream - or at least less of an uphill battle.  And while I've found some good literature focusing on public administration, it tends to be more academic, less accessible, and without a vision for transformation.


So it seems like there is a gap that I can make a material contribution to.


But I asked myself this morning why.  What's the long-term rationale for doing this?  And it hit me - it's not about me providing information for all those individuals out there. It's about bringing people out of the woodwork and creating a community who are passionate about public sector transformation.


Which just happens to be exactly what I'm already contributing to with the Collaboratory Melbourne and Collaborate to Innovate in Adelaide.


Reading about the vision for the Collab was the piece of the puzzle that let me make the obvious connection.  The large-scale systemic transformation so many of us envision can't be done by any one individual or organisation alone.  This transformation will only emerge from networks of passionate individuals working together.


The greatest contribution I can make to transforming public administration is not with new theories (which we have), with passionate change projects (which are happening everywhere), or even with dazzling intra/entrepreneurial nous (which... anyway).

It's by networking the people doing these great things.

So that was my revelation.  Will it change the world or what?

www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

exploring visual communication

I've been keeping myself busy exploring different ways of working, including my communication skills. In particular, how I can translate my thoughts into more visual or blended forms.  Hanging around with designers has highlighted how broad the options are - and how much more persuasive and engaging different forms can be.

I have been drawing pictures to go with this blog - admittedly very rough, but they are easier than poaching stuff from online, get me practicing, and work fine to break up the text.

I have been converting my note-taking practices into more refined concept overviews.  This basically involves being clearer, and using images and visual tools more imaginatively.  These notes on Damian Kernahan's (@protopartners) presentation at Service Design 2012 are a good example. (It was a great session by the way! I look forward to being able to engage with Damian more in future.)

My handiwork has really deteriorated since being a bit of a drawer as a child - you can see I struggle with the sharpie.

I will also be exploring how I can use Prezi more - I think it suits my style which is very text-based, but also revolves around logical connections between ideas.  I tried it here to express a couple of thoughts on fostering the Adelaide innovation community.  It took a very long time (for what is essentially a copy of 5 minutes worth of hand written notes), but seems clear, and I think is a good start for presenting ideas in a professional electronic manner.

My modus operandi is still to take text-based notes and convert to different forms, but I'm interested to watch whether this changes.


www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Learning from failure

Heading off the beaten path requires accepting a higher risk of failure.  This is just a position on risk, and a bit of guts. Fronting that failure when it happens is a different kettle of fish.

You may be aware of how I uprooted myself from a safe public sector job in Melbourne, to travel interstate and chase work with TACSI in Adelaide.  You may be aware this is going a little slower than preferred.  I probably won't have told you that my approach has failed.

I have been an Adelaide resident for around a month now.  While there has been enthusiasm and appreciation expressed for my dedication, at last notice I was still a month away from having anything meaningful to do - within TACSI at least.  In fact, I can't see anything meaningless.  Being an 'aspiring volunteer' is pretty shitty, especially with questionable certainty around timelines.  I've never tried to get inside somewhere from out in the cold before, so this is all very new, and I don't (yet) know what I'm doing.

I haven't exactly been wallowing.  I've been pretty busy getting familiar with my new city and creating a new life.  I have been making connections - locally and nationally - and dedicating time to learning, and developing my own ideas.  But all this stuff should be secondary.  Not because it is unimportant, but because it is simply 'off the critical path', in project management terms.  It can wait!

So things have been slow, they haven't gone to plan.  But on reflection, I'm not at a bad starting point.  I now have more useful connections, a life a little more settled so I can concentrate, a better sense of how things work at TACSI, and of my own direction and the value I can bring.  It has taken a few days but I've realised that 'failure' might mean going AWOL from the plan, but as long as I can reset my path along a new plan things won't be too bad after all.  And I'm learning about how (not) to rock up somewhere and offer to get involved.

So I have a new approach to try, a slightly new tack.  It's nothing fancy - just being proactive, and going out on a limb in terms of identifying ways that I can be of value.  'Selling myself' (for free!). The idea is basically to offer to be a 'resident [way of thinking]', lining up a general area of need for TACSI with my own skills.  Something like strategist, conceiver, analyst... one of the things I have proven I can do quite well in all sorts of contexts, but don't really know how to describe as a skill.

I don't know whether it will work - I know it won't go as intended.  But I'm much more positive about how I'll be able to learn from this, no matter how it goes.  It will be difficult, but I have a feeling it will be fun.  I'll let you know!

www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Pyramids and Plum Trees - on Organisational Philosophy

Everybody at some level has a thing against the rigid pyramids of organisational hierarchies, and the inflexible bureaucracy they harbor.  Okay, it may just be the people I mix with... but at any rate, Gordon MacKenzie certainly does, and his Orbiting the Giant Hairball provides some provocative reimagination that is fruitfully atypical.


We tend to think of ways to open up communication, get people collaborating, or flatten the org chart.  In Bourgon's New Synthesis for instance, she advocates government combining vertical hierarchy (for accountability purposes) with horizontal networks.


MacKenzie once upon a time was asked to contribute to a Hallmark organisational restructure.  But he didn't buy into the premise.  What he did instead was seek to understand his own objections, and articulate how an organisation could be reimagined.  He came to give a presentation advocating Hallmark look to develop 'plum trees'.

Photo from Gabemounce blog

I don't think there's a particular rationale for plums... but the metaphor is interesting.
MacKenzie sees a hierarchy where the top is assumed to be the most clued in (having the clearest vision), and the bottom works seven levels of delegation away from an actual view of the world.  Of course, this is not exact reality any more than the next simple model, but it is the philosophy for how organisations work in 99% of cases.
In contrast, he envisioned the organisation with an executive trunk and management branches, which are all built purely to foster the creative production of the employees that make up the leaves and fruit - not the other way around.  The tree's vision and connection to the outside world is primarily through its foliage, not the trunk.  It is also flexible and adaptable to growing conditions and feedback from the canopy.


I'm not without reservations for the metaphor.  It simplifies things, and in a few ways is just an inversion of the org-chart triangle - in particular it suggests management's function is just to support the 'real work' that employees do, and that the fundamental relationships should still be hierarchical (if inverted). I also think his exploration of the roots was more about completing the metaphor than actual illustration...


But that's not the point. It was still an invigorating read. It made me realise how pervasive a metaphor for the organisation can be, and how drastically different org structures and relationships can be imagined simply by changing these assumptions.


Taking the plum tree as an example... it could be implemented without real change to the organisation's network and positions. But it would have dramatic changes to the way people relate, and to the organisation's systems and processes.  Priorities would be completely altered, with 'supporting staff' now suddenly being number one priority, and 'gathering intel from staff' as the number one means of developing an understanding to make decisions.  Lots of organisations talk about these being priorities, but when you watch the decisions that get made in the higher halls of the org-pyramid, you usually notice a discomforting disconnect (and believe me, the staff notice too).


The way internal systems are set up - performance management systems for example - are usually heavily stamped with a pyramid philosophy. Think about the performance reviews you have done, the way you have been involved in business planning, or the last time an IT system was rolled out. You know something is a little amiss when an organisation has 'employer of choice' as a high level objective, that cascades down through the structural tiers, and leaves employees scratching their heads trying to create personal objectives that match their managers' interpretation of their directors' interpretation of the executives' interpretation of 'employer of choice', so that they can be properly accountable for how well they are contributing to corporate strategy.  Which presumably is the only way we can be sure they are actually doing something worthwhile, right?


Yes it's silly - but when your philosophy is a pyramid, that's what you get.




www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Orbiting the Hairball is not Painting by Numbers

I have just finished reading Gordon MacKenzie's 1996 'classic', Orbiting the Giant Hairball and highly recommend you do the same.

Messages

MacKenzie closes with a chapter on painting by numbers.  He talks about the artwork that we are all uniquely able to create with out lives.  On the other hand, social expectations lead us towards filling our canvas with brushstrokes that are only superficially ours - we are lead to follow in the footsteps of others, meeting normalised and derivative ideas of success. It's quite simple, if subtle, but it really made me sit back and take note - it's possible to feel like you're creating something worthwhile, but only realise well down the track that it was nothing of the sort.  It is a little tangential to the book's key points, but I think it's a rather clever metaphor and a good prompt to get out there and do something with what you've just learnt.

The book revolves around the metaphor of the 'hairball' of a (corporate) social environment - 'an entangled pattern of behaviour'. (Interview @Fast Company.)  To maintain vibrancy in this environment we must understand and play off the rules in that space, but keep a sufficient distance to avoid becoming trapped, and losing perspective and the freedom to move.

It's no wonder that government driven by rules and compliance will struggle to find creative, new solutions to deal with shifting issues.

One of MacKenzie's provocative points is that if you're to be creative, you can't know what will eventuate - so focusing on outcomes is counter-productive.

The Book

The book is driven by a series of anecdotes that make it an engaging, light read.

What I love most is the way it's illustrated and presented, with lovely use of sketches and typefaces. It leaves me feeling - nay, demanding! - that more books should be like this. It's made me think about how I present my own thinking as well.  Even if you don't read it, take the chance to pick it up and flick through it.

I will write a longer post soon, synthesising some of my thoughts from the book - about how we think about 'organisations'.  In the meantime, see if you can't find a copy to have a look at.

www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Austerity measures - digging out of the fiscal hole

Governments constantly tell us of the need to cut costs. Fair enough that it is important not to waste money - spending should be stripped back wherever we can identify how to stop wasting it. But usually cutting costs is more about struggling with too much worthy* stuff to spend it on, and just not enough dollars to do so.

At the moment, the need to be frugal - or austere - is particularly pertinent. Ministers are stressed about debt levels and retaining surpluses - as always. Commissions and taskforces (like the Victorian IRSF) are modeling future expenditure and telling us we need to find ways to reduce it, particularly given pessimistic income forecasts.

One thing no government taskforce will bother doing is looking at the past and identifying what spending paradigm put us in this position, or what we should have been doing a decade ago to have a more financially sustainable public sector.

Just imagine if they did - the conclusion would probably be that we needed to devote resources to investing in and adapting for the future. You know what that would mean? More spending. It's not really ironic, unless you think the most important fiscal imperative is austerity, cutbacks, and forcing 'efficiency' by limiting funding (rather than identifying waste). But it is incredibly important.

Einstein said - apparently - that you don't get out of a hole with the same thinking that got you in there. But that's exactly what governments around the world are attempting to do.

www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

The priority of impetus

I have been thinking about how to do good things, and why lots of great ideas and ideal solutions don't work. I've come to think that it's more important to focus on sensing and working with impetus (e.g. motivation, which I've posted on already) than being right, or having the best idea.


Discussions on the success of entrepreneurs and changemakers often come down to it being 'the right time', or to an idea or context being 'ripe'. (Not only is a given business idea likely not original, it's quite possibly already been tried.) It's also important to have the drive to see it through and to engage people to come with you.  There are a lot of factors that can make or break a good idea (or even a bad one).


For entrepreneurs, we all know you need to understanding the market, your own motivations, and how to 'sell' your idea to others.  Defining a 'problem' is a bit more nebulous and ill understood, but it's useful for refining the business concept.  I don't think it's appreciated that this is a way to identify the most important factor in success - impetus, not necessarily for the entrepreneur, but in the system that is being remodeled for business purposes.


For changemakers otherwise, I'm yet to come across similar systematic ways to understand the task at hand, rather than just determining the ideal solution. There is an understanding of the need to be 'systemic', and foster transformation, but not of actually how to make being systemic core to the task at hand. As a result, most efforts are driven by a vision or a good idea, with 'how to get there' something worked out along the way - not central to the idea itself.  In this case, the impetus of the individual (or group) is provided by the strength of the vision - but that's not enough to motivate broader change.  I think it may help to make working with impetus for change (in the system, other parties etc) the central priority, and working out how to shift or catalyse this.  So for changemakers working within other systems (rather than setting up their own business), impetus is even more critical than for entrepreneurs.


These thoughts are highly personal, in the sense that my background has always been to work out the best solution.  My history is weighted towards one end of a spectrum of impetus/action thinking, and idea/ideal thinking.  I am reacting to this, and for me I need to flee these inclinations - ideally, I presume there is some happy halfway point (but it would be rather ironic of me to try to find that in a post about sidelining idealism).  They also tie into friends' thoughts on the need to making research real, because we've done so much reductionist, specialised and abstracted work already.


By way of example, these thoughts arose reading Jocelyn Bourgon's New Synthesis of Public Administration, and thinking about the role the book may play in fostering change. I think the book crystalises current ideas, but doesn't necessarily offer new insights.  What it does do, however, is provide real authority and credibility for ideas that are otherwise at the fringe of thinking about government. So it potentially (with the help of other contextual circumstances) help provide the impetus for a discussion about change, and revision of how best to govern.  Nobody is going to run out and go 'okay, we have a new template for how government works, we're going to introduce a change plan to get us up to date' (Bourgon emphasises the 'New Synthesis' as a framework rather than a model, clearly conscious of the danger of this). But it might provide a touch point - or an excuse - to take a step back, or to give credibility to ideas that otherwise may have been seen as unnecessary (or worse).


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John Baxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter